Almost half a decade ago, eight Las Vegas men were indicted by a grand jury for conspiring to violate criminal copyright law.
The U.S. government labeled Jetflicks and iStreamitAll as two of the largest pirate streaming platforms in the United States.
Disguised as an aviation service, Jetflicks allegedly offered a library of 183,285 pirated TV episodes. iStreamitAll allegedly made available more than 118,479 TV shows and 10,980 movies to its customers; at the time more content than Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime could muster.
Some Plead Guilty, Others Dig in
Early on, Jetflicks programmer and iStreamitAll founder Darryl Julius Polo (aka djppimp) pled guilty to copyright infringement and money laundering; that earned him a 57-month sentence and a $1m forfeiture order.
Fellow Jetflicks programmer Luis Angel Villarino pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and was sentenced to one year and a day in prison.
The remainder, Kristopher Lee Dallmann, Douglas M. Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Edward Jaurequi, Peter H. Huber, and Yoany Vaillant Fajardo, dug in for the long haul. And what a haul that turned out to be.
COVID-19 Chaos
Why this case has dragged on for so long isn’t easily explained. To say that personal issues played a role would be an understatement. COVID-19 played a role too, and also provided cover for numerous pre-trial release violations that led the government to conclude that at least one defendant, “may as well not be under any supervision at all.”
One defendant refused court-ordered drug tests, informing a pretrial services officer that nothing could be done to enforce compliance. Another found out that wasn’t actually the case and was detained at least twice for violations.
Then there were the allegations of illegal searches, effective denial of Miranda and Fifth Amendment rights, infliction of psychological stress due to the coercive tactics of the FBI, and motions to suppress evidence. Yet this barely scratches the surface when viewed from a whole case perspective.
Trial Scheduled for March 2024
While it would be foolish to completely rule out the possibility of yet more drama unfolding between now and then, as things stand the case is scheduled for trial in Las Vegas starting March 4, 2024.
Due to the “nature of the case” and “the difficulties it presents” counsel for at least two defendants have filed motions seeking the appointment of co-counsel. An earlier filing on behalf of Dallmann provides context on the scale of what lies ahead.
“This case includes a voluminous amount of discovery and a lengthy docket sheet (i.e over 700 filings) in the Eastern District of Virginia. On April 15, 2022, the government provided defense counsel with approximately 423 gigabytes of data including at least 175,000 pages of print discovery (i.e. reports, photos, and spreadsheets),” it reads.
Heavyweight Discovery
For theoretical scale, a single sheet of regular office paper weighs around 5 grams, so 175,000 sheets represents 1,929lb (875kg) of print discovery. Other material in the 423GB haul includes FD-302s (FBI interview report forms), investigation reports, bank records, imaging reports, merchant transactions, emails from six different full Google accounts, search warrants, subpoena materials, audio and video recordings, and web page images.
“Besides this data, the government provided another 18.68 terabytes of data including images of various electronics such as servers, phones, tablets, drives, and evidence obtained from Canada pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request,” the filing adds.
As previously reported, the U.S. requested access to this data in March 2018 under the US-Canada Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT). The data was eventually handed over to the Department of Justice some 21 months later. It reportedly included reports from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, subscriber information documents, a list of tickets and messages pertaining to subscribers, plus five forensic images of servers located at OVH, a hosting provider in Canada.
Last September, Dallmann’s defense team reported that additional discovery-related requests were filed with the government in early 2023. A request made in February that year required the defense to supply their own hard drives in order to receive copies of the data.
“The government estimates it will take at least a couple of months to copy the data. The data requested contains 63.2 TB of storage.”
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
